conversations with birds: when birds dream.
When birds dream, it is of walking. In their dreams—in a meadow or a forest or a city (…ice floes, burlap of desert, carefully tilled fields lined with stones…) (…but never never the sea…)—they put one foot in front of the other for miles and miles. This lasts all night and is always exquisite.
Awake, their breasts pump like bloody hearts as they pummel their feathery selves into air. The night’s pleasure shapes their imaged souls as an upright creature whose step is proportioned in ideal measure for progress and contemplation. This image dwells—not in atmosphere nor air (and never never in the sea…)—on earth where birds’ souls, they imagine, are on two long legs released.
Xie Zhiliu
I write the word…
(Odalisque? Tightens her robe, brushes a feather from her cheek, settles down to clean sheets and
a bottle of ink. She writes the word Bird.)
…
…
my friend. the black swan.
(feathers swirl the feather bed’s sacked black swan trumpets arches his long neck squalls
mindless bird! great beast!
shakes his feathers grooms sails black feathered from the high black room.)
my friend hawk
(The hawk gazes from the window
like a saint from the door of an altar-piece.)
(Beyond, a minute wilderness.)
my friend the phoenix
(The phoenix barters plumage for matches.)
my friends (starlings)
(Starlings swarm. Thousands of sutures in an immaculate sky.)
I will write no more of love.
I will write no more of love.
Is anyone ever satisfied?
A Japanese poet, maybe.
When her lover (a jade bead
slipping along a silk cord
which is a path
white with almond blossoms
or snow?)
hurries.
My garments do not tie closed.
The stairs to my room are
dirty and who ever mounts them?
I am the odalisque who lives in an obelisk. I converse with birds.
